I found this assignment to be extremely difficult as far as finding inspiration for what my Performative Photography would be, basically I needed a starting point. After Professor Skvirsky had recommended that the class began first by choosing and audience, I figured I would try and start with whom that would be. In addition to that advice I found myself inspired by the outside participation in performative art work examples shown in class, particularly “Cut Piece”, which produced a highly unpredictable and interactive form of art. I also found inspiration in the idea that selfies are absolutely preformative which definitely resonated with how interpret selfies. My last source of inspiration, and what led to my “lightbulb moment” was actually a talk during my Thermal Fluids class where we talked about how powerful graphs and figures are in communicating ideas, and I figured I could attempt to translate that into my Preformative Photography. It was the intersection of these four ideas that consequently to create a combined sequence of four images that encapsulate these goals: Translucency.

The idea was simple. I would find 5 selfies of both guys and girls. The hope was that each one of these selfies was different in how Preformed they in fact were, meaning the first would be extremely stage and the fifth would be a mistake or capturing of true emotion. In was pretty incredible how the sources of the collection of photos varied greatly but correlated between the guys and girls group. The more staged ones were mostly collected from pinterest and Instagram while the true emotion came from confessions of suicide attempts and reactions to world events. While I believe they all were somewhat preformative it was interesting to attempt to find the silver lining between it all.

The second step was to show each set to my roommates. I had them rank them from most authentic looking to the most staged (they are both guys and picked the same exact order which was pretty interesting).

Finally, I laid these photographs on top which different transparencies, both going from the most staged to least and the reverse as well. I added the numbers to help provide the relationship being shown so that the photograph sequence would be stand alone with an explanation (this was derived from my Thermal Fluids inspiration). I was upset with end resolution of the image as major editing and techniques reduced the quality and decided to proved the individual segments as well to help the quality of the project. I put the photo in a GroupMe that I have with friends from home to see how they interpreted and they almost picked it up immediately with no explanation. It was also interesting to see how they had very different comments on the different gender and order combinations.

Selfies are preformative, and arguably Narcissistic, and I wanted to show that drawing in inspiration from my recent experiences and in that regard I think I succeeded. Although this was the most difficult assignment I also found it rewarding and very enlightening. Although I definitely began with the notion that preformative art was “weird” and “pointless”, I can now say I have a deep respect for these pieces and recognized how challenging they can be.

TRANSLUCENCY:

THE FAKE GIRL

THE REAL GIRL

THE REAL GUY

THE FAKE GUY